November 12, 2014

Ubuntu MATE 14.04 LTS Available For Download with updates

Because Ubuntu
MATE 14.10 was the first Ubuntu MATE release and it's supported for only 9
months, the Ubuntu MATE team released Ubuntu MATE 14.04 LTS yesterday, which is supported until
2019.

Ubuntu MATE is an unofficial (for now) Ubuntu
flavor which uses MATE as
the default desktop environment. MATE is a GNOME 2 fork introduced after GNOME 3
and GNOME Shell replaced the classic desktop metaphor, which led to some
criticism from the Linux community. Currently, MATE only supports GTK2, but the plan is to add
GTK3 support with MATE 1.12.

Ubuntu MATE 14.04 ships with MATE 1.8 by
default, and not MATE 1.6, which is available in the official Ubuntu 14.04
repositories. This was possible because Ubuntu MATE is not yet
an official Ubuntu flavor and that allowed using the Ubuntu MATE PPAs by
default.

Compared to Ubuntu
MATE 14.10, Ubuntu MATE 14.04 LTS comes with quite a few changes, although
many of these changes have already been released as updates for Ubuntu MATE
14.10. For instance, Ubuntu MATE 14.04 supports Ubuntu AppIndicators out of
the box:

An AppIndicator (Variety)
running under Ubuntu MATE 14.04 LTS

Note that the AppMenu / global menu applet is
available but it didn't work in my test.

Also, Ubuntu MATE 14.04 ships with some new
packages installed by default:

MATE Tweak (a MintDesktop fork) - a tool
which lets you configure which icons to show on the desktop, enable/disable
compositing, change the window buttons layout, show/hide icons in menus and
buttons and more;

MATE Menu (a MintMenu fork) - a
searchable menu for the MATE panel. This is not the default menu, but you can
add it to the panel by right clicking the panel, selecting Add to Panel and then
adding "MATE Menu";